I use Meebo.com as my multi-IM client. I love the clean interface, and the idea that I have all of my IM accounts are available anywhere I go. And I love the fact that Meebo doesn’t hog my CPU & memory the way Adium does. The only thing Meebo is missing is the ability to auto-join a chatroom. I have to join two chatrooms for work every day. Because Meebo’s process is manual, I constantly forget to join and then hear from a variety of co-workers: “Didn’t you see it in the chatroom?!” That is usually followed up by some jab at Meebo.

So what is this manual process?

Click the join room button

Select the IM account that needs to join the room

Type in the room name

Type in the server for the room name

Click “Join”

While that doesn’t sound terrible, it’s something that is annoying to do twice, every morning. So, I’ve been wanting to automate it for some time now. I tried Mac OS X’s Automator, but results with that were pretty inconsistent. I tried JavaScript, but for the life of me, I could never figure out how to select an IM account from the list. Meebo used some custom widget to display that list of accounts, and nothing I tried would actually trigger the selection of the right account.

Then something happened: I quit Google. Google Talk is no longer the first option! My office Jabber account is now! Admittedly, this is an incredibly lame solution, but since the correct account is now the first account in the list, I can use JavaScript to do everything else to auto-join the rooms.

I used Fluid to create a standalone “Meebo” app, and then used its “Userscripts” feature to add my custom JavaScript to the page. I’ve pasted the guts of the functionality below (you’ll have to modify it to work for your setup). And this morning, when I came into work, I opened up Meebo and there were my chat-rooms!